Persona 3

Great, wonderful game. Part high school dating sim, part dungeon crawler & pokemon breeder.
DIFFICULTY SETTINGS ZOMG. this series is known for its intimidatingly long and complex battles. i ragequit one of the DS games because after spending an HOUR on a boss a minion walked up and healed him to full health.
Battles need attention or else you'll lose a lot more health than neccessary and possibly get wiped on a random

RPG & sim as destiny blank slate

essay on RPGs as marxism SLASH destiny generators
How it doesn't always compare to IRL: i know a lot of fantastic and brave people, but i am kind of a lazy shit. if there were a "ignore everything else and play videogames" option i would probably take that for realism's sake. but there isn't and I can inhabit the shoes of someone who walks out of his dorm every night and *explores*, for the sake of finding something new to do. as opposed to cracking a brewski and lighting up my latest jrpg obsession

Tarot

Some relationships are accidentally quite sophisticated in their understanding of the tarot. However a lot of it falls flat on its face

Violence

& Hiphop

history of cultural criticism. performative violence.
"When Big got into it with Tupac, some hip-hop journalists were like, Hey, isn’t this the same nigga who said c4 at your door? Why hasn’t he planted a bomb in Pac’s house yet? which is just the kind of dumb shit that rap always gets subjected to. Not to say there wasn’t real beef there, lethal beef, maybe, but Entertainment Weekly isn’t outraged that Matt Damon isn’t really assassinating rogue CIA agents between movies." - jay-z's "decoded" which is p good fyi

as a verb

sure, sometimes Nathan Drake gets told “but you ALSO murdered a thousand people today” by the genocidal Bad Guy, and we ignore the glib conflation of performative violence (unloading 20 rounds into a dude wearing a wifebeater while hiding behind a wall for 20 seconds until we recover from the gunshot wounds we received in retaliation) with actual violence (murder) because, for a moment, we are forced to acknowledge that violence is really our only verb when a controller is in our hands. and when andrew ryan (fuck you if this is a spoiler, I haven’t even played the game and I know this) says we must kill, we pretend it’s something other than inevitable that a game consisting of 100% violence would end in more violence. like for a second we look under the veil, we buy into the illusion, go under. and then satisfied with our momentary adventure we let it fall back into place and another round of fake gunshots are exchanged and we teabag corpses

as culture

As language
violence is also an inevitable part of our culture. we’re capitalists, we’re a republic, war is an industry, industry creates jobs in congressional districts, jobs are profitable, profits sponsor campaigns. we can talk about RPGs without combat all we want, but violence is the mode of expression for the vast majority of games we play. I don’t think Ben Kuchera is even aware he wrote this:
“as I blew things up and bodies flew and missiles zipped to their targets, I felt like pumping my fist in the air.”
that’s a privilege accorded to him, because after years of tenuous links between gaming and violence, we’ve finally stepped out of the shadow of NWA and into the spotlight of socially-acceptable violence – the kind targeted against America’s Enemies. it’s just patriotism!

Sexism

BECAUSE YOU HAVEN'T HEARD ENOUGH FROM WHITE HETERO MALES ABOUT FUCKING DICKWOLVES YET

Dominant power does something wrong / perceived as wrong

The fact that this structure exists and is so common is certainly proof of some sort of social equilibrium

Where "equilibrium" means "a natural response to bring the system back to a steady state" aka the status quo. So essentially the idea is that when someone challenges the status quo, society has a bunch of mechanisms for correcting that - this is a common idea in lots of teen literature, esp high school drama/comedy

Eternal Sonata

I love tri ace but god help me this story is atrocious and the pacing is horrible. Baiten Kaitos was WAAYYYY better.

usability BLOWZZZ

WHY CAN'T I FUCKING SAVE ANYWHERE. DIDN'T WE END THIS DEBATE LIKE TEN FUCKING YEARS AGO
Also: button functions should be visible at ALL TIMES.